Donald Trump has a very good chance of being our next President. We need to admit it if we want to do anything about it. If you’re thinking Trump can’t win, you’re either in a bubble or lying to yourself.
He’s not a sideshow. He’s not someone to laugh at. Many of his supporters have real grievances that the major political parties and their fellow citizens have ignored. Voting for Trump is not illogical for some people in the US. He is the first person to at least speak to them and offer a hand. Unfortunately, he’s done it in a terrible way, taking advantage of their plight for personal gain, increasing fear and scapegoating people who don’t deserve it.
Trump is a real threat to our country. He is already taking us down a dark path that makes us less safe both at home and abroad.
We need to make sure Donald Trump doesn’t become President Trump. Although he hits on some major problems in the US, he will be a disaster for the United States and the world, betraying the people who he purports to help, just like the major political parties have done for the past 35 years.
I’m not a Hillary supporter, I really dislike her. I would vote for Kasich, Bernie, Romney, McCain, Obama (if he could), Kaine, Warren, Biden, Bloomberg, Rubio and many more ahead of her.
I don’t like the modern dynasty of Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton/Bush, only broken by 8 years of Obama. I don’t like it when power stays in the family, like Argentinian quasi dictators who set up their wives for power after they leave. I don’t trust her. At all.
She’s in bed with the big banks. She uses fake Southern accents when campaigning in the south. The clear misuse of the email server. If she was anyone else, she’d face a big fine, potential jail and at least be disqualified as a presidential candidate. I really dislike the at least perceived use of the Clinton Foundation to curry favor with donors and foreign governments.
But in our binary system in a choice between a lying, calculating politician who only cares about carving out a personal legacy vs. a narcissistic, opportunistic, power hungry, short tempered, autocrat fraudster who doesn’t read, has nice things to say about brutal dictators, the Tiananmen Square killings and more, I can’t not to vote for Hillary.
Against Donald Trump, I’ll vote for her. Because Donald Trump would be a disaster for our country. The simple truth is that Trump represents a real threat to the United States and to the world.
Why?
Trump is a fraud. He’s likely not even a billionaire. He’s short tempered. He doesn’t read books. He wants to meddle with the international order that’s prevented war in the US and Europe since WWII. He misrepresents facts and preys on emotion. He’s vengeful. He’s attacked military veterans. He uses racial fear and prejudice to appeal to voters, even retweeting multiple “stats” and memes from white supremacist websites.
He’s a huckster who only cares about personal power and wealth. He’s abandoning patriotic themes that have made the US a world class country, turning toward Russia. And his new buddy Putin is playing him like a fiddle. Trump’s only in it to stroke his massive ego and augment his personal power. He won’t release his tax returns to show his likely conflicts of interest with Russia, that he’s likely not a billionaire, his likely lack of charitable giving, his likely offshore tax haven accounts, his likely lack of paying much in taxes.
The worst part of Donal Trump is that his supporters deserve a champion who will actually fight for them. I mean really fight for them.
Not claim to be the “working class champion,” but actually hire 78 foreign workers while he’s running for President. Not just insult people and make proclamations. But actually provide workable solutions for people who have real grievances: job losses to technology, the top 1% and .01% getting all of the gains since the financial crisis, a bank bailout instead of bailout to the people, changes in culture, and loss of status.
He reminds me of Latin American strongman populist dictators, caudillos, like Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, and Cristina Fernandez or Russian strongmen like Vladimir Putin who exploit real class divisions and attack other branches of government to seize power and enrich themselves and leave their country in even worse disarray than they found it, while being willing to use dubious methods to do so.
He’s a man who said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Imagine that man in charge of the FBI, the military and a government that has the biggest arsenal in world history? Not to mention our nuclear weapons.
He’s a man who asked or invited a dictatorial foreign power to hack a US citizen’s government email account. Imagine if he had the power use the NSA to access his enemy’s, perceived or real, emails, texts and private conversations? This is not a man we can trust with our massive surveillance state.
Donald Trump: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”https://t.co/XHc9hh4gBt
— CSPAN (@cspan) July 27, 2016
How did we get here?
Economy and Culture is Changing Too Fast without Adequate Government/Societal Response
Economy
Our global economy no longer works for a large number of people. Trump and Bernie blame international trade and bad tax policy, which rightly do deserve some blame, but the main culprit is technology destroying jobs at an unprecedented rate. Our meritocratic ideology has told people for generations that if they work hard, they’ll get ahead. It’s still true for some people. But many people can’t evolve as fast as technology is changing.
Simply saying “you should work harder, let’s cut taxes and promote free trade” as the Republicans have done doesn’t help someone who’s lost their manufacturing job as a 35 year old. Or someone who went to university expecting a good paying job, but now works at Starbucks.
Supporting policies like open immigration that suppresses wages, climate change regulation, and penalizing coal use, like the Democrats have done, disproportionally hurts the working class. We’re going to have massive creative destruction. We can’t stop it even if we wanted to without massively lowering our standard of living. The political parties completely screwed up by not helping the people who were sold the American Dream and ended up worse off than they thought they would be.
This is also a culture election. A protest election. It’s railing against the big banks, the politicians, the people who insist you can’t say things. It’s about the politicians unwillingness to speak in real terms. It’s about promises to help that have been broken for decades.
Republicans have said that if you just support the conservative movement, you’ll have a better life. God, tax cuts, hard work and patriotism. They haven’t delivered for the working class for more than 30 years. GDP and the stock market has soared, but you can’t feed your family on GDP. For those outside the top 30%, its stagnant wages, and even worse, life is getting harder, life expectancies are going down, drug use is up, and the alienation of our modern society makes it worse.
The Democrats have been the party of banks, immigration, handouts and treated poor people as if they have little or no agency. You’re poor because something’s been done to you, rather than something you can fix, so the thinking goes, which leads to more victimization. When someone comes along and tells you that you can fight back, proud people will jump at the opportunity. Even if the guy telling you to fight back is a demagogue. But at least he’s your demagogue.
Studies show that people are happier when they win a $10,000 lottery than someone who wins a lottery for $100,000, but then loses $50,000. We’ve told people they were going to be $100,000 winners via the American Dream, but are now only $30,000 winners.
A Donald Trump is what happens when the elites and politicians value their own interests first and don’t help the rest of us, and is intensified by the greatest change since the industrial revolution.
It’s affecting people across class, race and education levels: from people left behind by closing factories to those with college degrees who thought things would be better like promises were made and haven’t been kept. All the while the top keep getting richer, the politicians worse, and events in the country give people a growing sense of decline.
Culture
Next, think about culture shock. People used to know the rules of the game. Culture is moving so fast right now, aided by technology. Humans haven’t evolved to adapt to cultural change extremely quickly, but with the rise of technology, things are changing at an exponential rate. Jobs that used to last hundreds of years now have a half life a less than a decade. Old social conventions, many of them unfair at best and discriminatory at worst, have changed in half a generation.
We went from having to know phone numbers to never needing to remember them. From VCRs, to DVDs to Netflix. From small, locally owned shops to Walmart and Amazon. From gays being ostracized to mainstream. From “normal” American food, to sushi in Arizona, Wisconsin and other small towns.
Many previously respected professions are now relegated to humor. Where white working class people are the people who are the brunt of jokes. Where we talk openly about transgendered people and young people proclaim they’re “gender fluid”. Where towns that used to be all white now have Spanish and Arabic speakers. Where many people knew how to fit in. To be clear, I don’t think these changes are bad. But put yourself in the shoes of someone who feels the world is spinning away from what they know, who now feels out of place in their own country.
Social justice warriors or bigoteers who have stifled debate with political correctness have made things worse. Going over board on political correctness paints people into a corner and doesn’t allow them an out. It becomes extremely hard for people to change their minds when exposed to new information and experiences once they’re in the corner. To make people comfortable in a changing culture, welcome them, educate them, don’t shame and vilify them for attitudes that likely rise from ignorance instead of hate.
As Dale Carnegie put it in How to Win Friends and Influence People, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”
The toxic brew of rapid cultural change, being the brunt of jokes and bigoteering lead to alienation and a desire to harken back to the past when things were “normal,” or at least didnt change so fast. And when politicians aren’t willing to say things that many people believe are common sense, it opens the gate for someone who’s willing to burn it all down.
How can we avoid President Trump?
The media, the left and the people who view him a a joke are helping him win. Those who who shocked and appalled by every trolling Trump comment are helping him win. The conservatives calling him not a true conservative are helping him win.
The best ways to go after Trump:
- Business record – Show that he’s a scam artist and huckster
- Russia – Show his massive ties to Russia that at best compromise him, and at worst put him in Putin’s pocket
- Show he’s only in it for himself – Show that he actually won’t help the people he’s supposedly championing.
- Get under his skin – Show his narcissism and inability to take even an ounce of criticism. He’ll implode.
- Treat poor whites like we treat other ethnic minorities: people worthy of respect, who shouldn’t be the brunt of white trash jokes.
- Stop attacking for racism, sexism, things he’s said…it only helps him
- Stop saying you cant understand why anyone would vote for him
Dale Carnegie said that if you attack people, it just entrenches their position. Calling Trump and his supporters racist, stupid, uneducated, lazy and worse when many of his supporters have real grievances just makes it more likely they’ll be motivated to burn it all down on election day. If we want to avoid a President Trump, we need to hammer Trump on Russia, his business record and get under his skin. Show him to be the huckster who’s only in it for himself that he really is.
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